[governance] It's Time to Stop ICANN's Top-Level Domain (TLD)

[Milton L Mueller]

We dealt with this issue at some length in the 2005 National Research Council report.
Ever since 1996, people have been confusing the DNS, and the demand for new domain names, with the demand for search and location services.
And ever since, they have been predicting (falsely) that the demand for domain names would decline as search tools improved. Indeed, many were hoping that all the sticky DNS policy issues would just go away as this happened. It was wrong, wishful thinking.

Instead, there is continuing, long-term growth in second level domains. The reason is simple. If Ian Peter is given a choice between an email address that says ian.peter at user.isp.com<mailto:ian.peter at user.isp.com> or ian at ianpeter.com<mailto:ian at ianpeter.com>, he will prefer the latter. The same is true for millions of others. That means that we want our websites and email addresses to have meaningful, accessible names. It has nothing to do with searching for content. It has to do with identification and memorization.

I will accede to your argument about new TLDs not being needed, Ian, the day you give up ianpeter.com because anyone can find your website using Google. ;-)

From: Ian Peter [mailto:ian.peter at ianpeter.com]
Sent: Friday, November 05, 2010 4:42 PM
To: Rafik Dammak; governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] It's Time to Stop ICANN's Top-Level Domain (TLD)

Hi Rafik,

Resource discovery is , simply, "being able to find things" on the Internet.

The original reason for having domain names was that it was thought (correctly) that it would be easier to remember the name of a site than the IP number of the site (eg easier to remember berkeley.edu than 199.133.223.253). Thus the domain name system was born and a mechanism was needed to map all internet addressable numbers to appropriate names.

These days the domain name is becoming less and less relevant for this task. People use search engines, directories and apps rather than directly using names to find things. The awkwardness of the domain name system in providing sensible resource discovery with the internet the size it is now (let alone what is to come) has led a lot of people to look at other ways to do this.

Ian Peter

________________________________
From: Rafik Dammak <rafik.dammak at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2010 05:05:05 +0900
To: <governance at lists.cpsr.org>, Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com>
Cc: Avri Doria <avri at psg.com>
Subject: Re: [governance] It's Time to Stop ICANN's Top-Level Domain (TLD)

Hi Ian,

you mentioned many times resource discovery, can you please clarify what you mean by it? I am not sure that everybody here share the same definition.

Rafik

2010/11/6 Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com>
Avri wrote


>  It is all well and
> good that you have a preference for maintaining the current restricted
> incumbent market,


Not at all, and IDNs are a case in point where expansion makes sense for as
long as domain names maintain usefulness - but any attachment of exorbitant
fees to IDNs to allow them to be established would be ridiculous.

I'm simply pointing out, as others are, that endless expansion of domain
name suffixes does nothing to aid resource discovery or improve internet
governance.





____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20101106/3d221ded/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t